[Scalzi responds: They didn't win. And in any event I doubt this will be the last time we get a chance to discuss this topic here. The essays and the comments across all the entries gave me personally a whole lot to think about, and I think lots of other people found things to think about as well. I'll be coming around to this topic again, hopefully with new and equally interesting guest posters.]

Edited to Add: Actually, I think I will in fact close down comments for now. Thank you everyone for your participation, and again special thanks to Tempest for her essay today.

And I give major kudos to John for doing what he can to keep things on track. This particular drift is subtle than regular derailment since it’s technically on topic.

There is a valuable conversation to be had on “depictions of disfavored identity-groups in fiction.” Sadly, despite its potential for some real dialogue,* I am not certain that this has been that conversation… or, at least, that the signal-to-noise ratio has not been nearly high enough.

What bothers me almost as much about the disintegration of this thread as the initial perceived need for it is that the way it has fallen apart — from the initial RaceFail to this one — has been utterly predictable (and, worse yet, at the instigation of a couple of known Bad Actors).

There is no recipe/formula/method for “proper and correct” inclusion of any particular identity group in fiction. That’s part of the point of fiction: That, as the crowd agreed outside Brian of Nazareth’s window, “Yes! We are all individuals!” Or, to put it in perhaps excessively theoretical form: Just as I cannot necessarily define the correct, definitive interpretation of a given text, but I can point out that many interpretations of a given text are deeply, deeply wrong, neither I (nor anyone else) can definitively state the “right” way to deal with PoCs, or women, or Wiccans, or left-handed plumbers, in fiction… but I can point out that many methods for doing so suck more than an industrial vacuum.

As Justice Stewart put it, he may not have been able to define “obscenity,” but he knew it when he saw it. It is not ironic — it is consistent with and predictive of the decay of the RaceFail “event” and attempts to deal with it — that Justice Stewart was discussing pornography, or at least what some people accused of being pornography.

* Hint: The conversion to competing monologues… including, to some extent, mine, I’ll admit.

Putting on my Library Administrator hat…

Libraries love buying things that they know have a guaranteed audience. Along with feeling like we are doing our job, it also means a) our statistics improve and b) we increase goodwill in the community. Both these things help us when the annual budget is being negotiated, and also when doing private fundraising.

Further, libraries love *offering programs* on things they know have a guaranteed audience. Programs are cost-intensive from a staff-hours point of view–there’s the planning, the publicizing, the running, etc. When people come and say, for example, “it would be great to have a sf/f discussion group, and here’s a suggested reading list for the first 3 or 4 meetings,” that can get noticed.

Even further, many state library agencies and associations have diversity initiatives going on these days. (Diversity is a recurring hot topic in the profession). It’s worth checking out if your state is one of them, and plugging into that. Sometimes, there is grant money floating around, looking for projects. Demonstration of community interest looks *really* good on grant applications, and libraries *really* like getting grants for programs. (See above about programs being cost-intensive).

I’m just sayin’, having a little chat with one’s friendly local librarians could lead to some interesting things. I can’t guarantee anything, obviously, since it depends so much on local circumstances. But still.

I was rereading your original post, and got to the last line. Yes, I do hope to see you writing YA (and to my hopes, adult SF/F as well). Why? Because I think that YA is where our hope lies. Younger readers of SF/F will, as they grow, demand more of what they are getting in the YA market from their adult fiction. Being used to reading books from and about POC, they will want more of it, and their demand will move the publishing industry off of its ‘default to WP’ stasis. Editors of YA who move to the adult genre markets will not be wearing those same old blinders.

Until then, I will support Verb Noire, the Carl Brandon winners/lists, and do whatever I can to ensure that more good SF/F is written that reflects and reaches out to more of the world than just my portion.

Besides, I love YA fiction.

Since everywhere we look among these groups yeye referred to, in whatever media, with sf/f references — whether in movie theaters, comix book stores, watching sf/f television, and buying books for pete’s sake! — a and among comedians and riffers of all kinds, making sf/f references, it’s impossible to understand where comes this idea that these ‘groups’ do not really care about the stuff. Does no one ever watch, say, Boondocks? It’s the same with people whose language heritage via parents is Spanish.

This canard gets stated over and over again, as if deeply researched truth, though it isn’t deeply researched and it certainly isn’t truth.

SF/F isn’t going to go away. It’s ingrained in the popular culture of the U.S., Canada, Japan, China. The tropes show up in popular cultural expressions in the Middle East among the young, along with hiphop and rap and reggae. However, the non-diverse ghetto may be on the schedule for demolition by right of cultural eminent domain, as the entire sandy cliff of publishing as she has been known for a century digitally and economically shifts and changes, and slides initially, gradually, picking up velocity and volume, then collapses.

Without making it worse, we could state that the sacrifices Tempest and others have made should not be forgotten, now or in the future. Maybe Ms. Bradford is not perfectly polite with every, little thing. Perhaps MAM might have avoided saying we’re all racists (and getting me to buy into it, to be roasted after going with her theme).

These days, everyone wants the elegant solution to a problem. Albert Einstein and Buckminster Fuller made it look soooo easy. I have made a career (aerial imagery recognition & analysis) from working with people that were blind to the possibility that an ugly solution may be the best; at least for the time being. Of course, the solution at hand has to actually work.

I want to move from an ugly solution to the elegant one. Speculative fiction can point the way or be belittled for its failure to predict the future.